Python Pandas removing substring using another column

Question

I\'ve tried searching around and can\'t figure out an easy way to do this, so I\'m hoping your expertise can help.

I have a pandas data frame with two columns

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Answer 1

You could do it with replace method and regex argument and then use str.strip:

In [605]: testing.FULL_NAME.replace(testing.NAME[testing.NAME.notnull()], '', regex = True).str.strip()
Out[605]: 
0            LAST
1             NaN
2      FIRST LAST
3           FIRST
4     FIRST  LAST
5    ANOTHER NAME
6       LAST NAME
Name: FULL_NAME, dtype: object

Note You need to pass notnull to testing.NAME because without it NaN values also will be replaced to empty string

Benchmarking is slower then fastest @johnchase solution but I think it's more readable and use all pandas methods of DataFrames and Series:

In [607]: %timeit testing['NEW'] = testing.FULL_NAME.replace(testing.NAME[testing.NAME.notnull()], '', regex = True).str.strip()
100 loops, best of 3: 4.56 ms per loop

In [661]: %timeit testing ['NEW'] = [e.replace(k, '') for e, k in zip(testing.FULL_NAME.astype('str'), testing.NAME.astype('str'))]
1000 loops, best of 3: 450 µs per loop